A Report On The Translation Of Ordinary Families,Special Children (Chapter 9)

This is a translation project report on the excerpt from the book Ordinary Families,Special Children written by Milton Seligman and Rosalyn Benjiamin Darling.This popular book provides a multisystem perspective on childhood disability and its effects on family life.Chapter nine explores the factors that appear to influence sibling relationships,and adjustment when one of them has a disability.This book has no Chinese version currently.Translating this chapter can not only improve the author’s translation level,but also provide reference for related researches.This translation practice belongs to informative text,which is conducted under the guidance of Newmark’s communicative translation theory and contrastive linguistics.The core of Nemark’s communicative translation theory is to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the original readers.Contrastive linguistics emphasizes the importance of studying the differences between the two languages so as to solve the problems encountered in teaching or translation.The differences between English and Chinese are mainly in terms of vocabulary,grammar,discourse and pragmatics.What’s more,the main problems encountered in the translation include the translation of names and proper nouns,the selection of meanings of polysemy,and the processing of long sentences.Aiming at solving these problems,the writer tries to use these methods: conversion of parts of speech,amplification,recasting and so on,to make the translation smooth and natural,better accepted by the target language readers.Through this translation practice,the author realizes the importance of correctly understanding the original,deeply studying translation theory and expanding the knowledge.But there are still some problems to be solved.For example,the translation of some materials cited in the text is not natural.